In Mira Pickus’s solo show, mint frappe—which she wrote, directed, and stars in—she spends a bit of time sitting at a bedroom vanity. Staring through the pretend mirror to the audience, she muses and frets about two themes that preoccupy, disturb, and amuse her character: disgust and vanity.
These two conditions of self-regard are like flip images of one another. “I wanted to explore that—the counterbalance of vanity to disgust,” Pickus said.
In the play she has moments when she exudes confidence. “Sometimes I'm really hot, and everyone wants me and loves me, and I’m really smart!” she said in an interview a couple weeks before the show. But in a whiplash, these sentiments turn. “And then I hate everything about myself and my body. I am so small and tiny, a worm!”
Her character worries at different times that she is “intolerable,” “impenetrable”—frighteningly, unloveable.
The play is titled mint frappe, and Pickus’s character is called M. The color green makes a dominant impression, both in the language M uses and on the stage. Pickus designed, built, and painted the set—work she began in an independent study last fall with Assistant Professor of Theater Germán Cárdenas-Alaminos. Resembling the interior of an apartment, the stage has a floral decor: its floor is lime, clumps of moss adorn its fixtures, the room is decorated with fake plants. Pickus wears green eyeliner and clothes.
“Green is incredibly important to the play, it is all about green,” Pickus said. Greenness connotes verdant, life-sustaining, nourishing nature. It is also the color for decomposition and rotten food, she points out.
Over the course of the 45-minute play, M speaks her thoughts and fantasies out loud (she calls the ones that come at night, in bed, her “nightly pensivities,” especially the ones where she constructs “little life scenes centering on the core theme of your crush liking you back).” She also occasionally takes a call from a friend, with whom she laments about her unrequited crush.
Pickus began thinking about the play last winter, ruminating over the many ideas she had written down in journals and for class essays—about disgust and vanity, but also about fullness, nourishment, and disease. Though she was in the very early stages of creativity, when her imagination was full but she had no clear route to a plot or script, ϳԹվ’s theater department got behind her.
“I wanted a way to explore those themes and had the very, very vague idea that maybe in the future this would become a play,” Pickus said. “I reached out to Professor Killeen [Abigail Killeen, professor of theater] and said, 'I know this is amorphous, but would you have any interest in advising a summer research project, where I work on these and dramatize them?' And she was super on board.”
I wanted to explore that—the counterbalance of vanity to disgust,” Pickus said. In the play, she has moments when she exudes self-love and confidence. “Sometimes I’m really hot, everyone wants me and loves me, I’m really smart!” Then, in a whiplash, the sentiments turn. “And then I hate everything about myself and my body. I am so small and tiny, a worm!”
Pickus received a fellowship from ϳԹվ to live on campus over the summer and work on the play. In the fall, she was approved to continue developing her show and was awarded funding with a Fall Research Award.
Killeen said that advising Pickus has been “inspiring and joyful.” She found an easy balance between applying her expertise without imposing her own taste or sensibilities, due to “Mira's strong but malleable vision for the play, her voracious curiosity, and her sense of humor that always, always carries the day,” she wrote in an email.
She also praised Pickus's mint frappe for the way it translates personal experiences into the universal, “and how it highlights Mira’s intellect, wit, courage, and creativity.”
Pickus began her work last summer by drafting a series of autobiographical essays, many of them about self-disgust. She is up-front about the source for much of that dissatisfaction: she was diagnosed with a painful chronic condition her sophomore year. When she first experienced the mysterious affliction, she was in so much agony she couldn’t walk.
“There is also a kind of anger at the heart of the play,” Pickus said, “for issues that go unnoticed and don’t have a place to be sorted out.”
The next phase of her work had her turning to the writers who had initially galvanized her exploration of these themes. She experienced a moment of recognition her sophomore fall when she took the class Mean Women Writers with Marilyn Reizbaum, ϳԹվ's Harrison King McCann Professor of English. During a unit on disgust, the class read Katherine Mansfield’s short repulsive story, “Je ne parle pas français,” and the theorist Sianne Ngai’s book, Ugly Feelings.
“I was very interested in disgust academically and reading a lot of female writers working with disgust, and I was also interested in the female experience of, ‘I hate my body!,’” Pickus said. At one point in the play, she takes aim at the self-help industry directed at women and its weak platitudes.
“Self-love is cheap. 'Love yourself, look in the mirror and recite the affirmations: I am strong, I am hot, my tits look good! Love yourself, you have to before you can love someone else,' or so the saying goes. But I know a lot of self-hating people in relationships, a lot of people who in fact don't love themselves, and so have secured that relationship to have someone else do the loving for them. It's an outsource of labor, if you will, no different than manufactured in China.”
Though Pickus started the playwriting process unsure of the outcome—“maybe a play will come out of this, maybe it won’t,” she told herself—by early August she had finished a first draft of a script.
“If no play had happened, it would have been a good experience reading and writing,” she said, “and for 90 percent of the summer, I was like, ‘There will be no play, I will bury these essays and no one will ever read them.’”
But there is a play, one that will be performed April 17 and 18 in Wish Theater, and one that bears witness to struggle, anger, and frustration, all while being fast-paced, lyrical, and funny.
“I want to bring in the audience, to have them with me, to share this thing that doesn’t have a place anywhere else,” Pickus said. “I expect a lot of my female peers will feel very seen.”
